The underlying Marxist views become apparent when Lefebvre really gets "deep" into this writing. He begins to mention how social class was less clear in earlier times when there were, "'estates' and 'castes' rather than classes." Yet today we have very "intolerably colourful" crowds walking down the streets today. An obvious signifier of social class is the clothing attire and the way one upholds themselves on the street and even with that symbolism, Lefebvre claims it is not much at all to tell ones social class.
The Marxist views really are set upon us readers like in the last paragraph. "Far away, in the workers' suburbs or on the working-class housing estates, everything is functional, a signal of the repetitive actions that maintain the workforce in everyday life..."
I think it is important to consider the ways in which Lefebvre is not looking at the street as a point of 'depth', but rather as a matter of absolutely significant *surface* interest. When Lefebvre states: "As soon as the street loses this [original] attraction, either because it is deserted or because, contrariwise, dense traffic makes it unbearable, the city turns into a lunar desert" (97)—it seems to me that he is giving us a 'Marxist view' that is anything but 'deep', because it is sharply focused on the actual things that are happening 'on the ground', as it were. Does that make sense? Sometimes we use the phrase 'deeper meaning' when it might be more precise to say that we are paying attention to material on the surface. This gets at what you are saying about class-symbolism on the street: it's actually in/on what people wear, right? The 'deeper meanings' would actually be the "fetishes": those "intermediaries that become dominant"—the exchanges that call for, in Lefebvre's words, "detailed analysis" (98).
ReplyDelete